Drug Repurposing (DR) is an alternative to the traditional drug discovery process. It is cost and time effective,with high returns and low-risk process that can tackle the increasing need for interventions for varied diseases and new outbreaks. Repurposing of old drugs for other diseases has gained wider attention, as there have been several old drugs approved by the FDA for new diseases. In the global emergency of COVID-19 pandemic, this is one of the strategies implemented in the repurposing of old anti-infective, anti-rheumatic and anti-thrombotic drugs. The goal of the current review is to elaborate the process of DR, its advantages, repurposed drugs for a plethora of disorders, and the evolution of related academic publications. Further, detailed are the computational approaches: literature mining and semantic inference, network-based drug repositioning, signature matching, retrospective clinical analysis, molecular docking and experimental phenotypic screening. We discuss the legal and economic potential barriers in DR, existent collaborative models and recommendations for overcoming these hurdles and leveraging the complete potential of DR in finding new indications.

药物再利用（DR）是传统药物发现过程的替代方法。它具有成本效益和时间效益，具有高回报和低风险的过程，可以满足对各种疾病和新疫情的干预措施日益增长的需求。将旧药重新用于其他疾病已经引起了更广泛的关注，因为 FDA 已经批准了几种旧药用于治疗新疾病。在COVID-19大流行的全球紧急情况下，这是对旧的抗感染、抗风湿和抗血栓药物进行再利用所实施的策略之一。本次综述的目的是详细阐述 DR 的过程、其优势、针对多种疾病的重新利用药物以及相关学术出版物的演变。此外，详细介绍了计算方法：文献挖掘和语义推理、基于网络的药物重新定位、特征匹配、回顾性临床分析、分子对接和实验表型筛选。我们讨论了 DR 中的法律和经济潜在障碍、现有的合作模式以及克服这些障碍并充分利用 DR 寻找新适应症的潜力的建议。